Imeem Mobile Streams Your MP3s to Your (Android) Phone

Imeem mobile, the top music app in the Google Android marketplace, added a powerful new feature on Tuesday that lets users stream all of the MP3s they’ve uploaded to the service directly to their phone, for free.

The goal here is to let your phone play more of your music than it can store on its own memory: cloud-based entertainment in action. According to imeem CEO Dalton Caldwell, early imeem mobile adopters had clamored for the addition.

"We had very loud, clear, specific user feedback — people really wanted access to their [collected] music on their mobile device," he explained via phone. "And so the big announcement here is that we’re adding the MyMusic feature."

The new MyMusic tab means lists all of the music you’ve uploaded to imeem.com, sorted by artist, essentially letting Google Android roll their own celestial jukeboxes. Depending on what tier of user you are, there’s a different limit on how many tunes your account can handle.

"The absolute maximum, if you’re a super premium user ($100 per year), is 20,000 songs," said Caldwell. "But if you’re just a regular free imeem user that just showed up today, it’s limited to a hundred songs. I think it’s such an interesting feature that I would become a more premium user if this hits my sweet spot, so it has an interesting business model in addition to the advertising."

To simplify the uploading process, the company recently launched an
Adobe Air application for Linux, Mac and Windows desktop and laptops that scours your drives for MP3s and uploads them in a big batch, even over an intermittent connection.

"Between the desktop and mobile integration, we’re trying to build an ecosystem that’s far more convenient than what’s out there today," he added.

Isn’t this the exact same thing that got MP3.com sued by the labels back in 2000, when they offered the my.MP3.com service, which performed a similar function (albeit not to a phone)?

"The feedback that we’ve gotten from the labels and from bands in general is that imeem is great, streaming is great, but they want to see imeem equal more sales," responded Caldwell. "In an imeem world, how can we encourage people to own music, and have a reason to do downloads?"

Good point. If you can hear any song in the world on-demand in seconds, why bother collecting music? But Caldwell said the MyMusic feature increases fans’ incentive to purchase (or otherwise acquire) music.

"On the web, it’s all streaming on demand," he added. "This was a very specific project that we put together to give you a very compelling reason to purchase music and to feed into this ecosystem that I mentioned… When you own the music, you can access it from multiple locations, which is sort of the holy grail [and one reason the tech industry lobbyied to end DRM on music downloads]."

However attractive imeem’s private collection-streaming feature might be on Android phones, it’s still not available on other platforms, including the current market leader, Apple’s App Store. Imeem has plans to migrate to other platforms — but only after it has honed its Android app by adding more features the competition lacks.

"You’re definitely going to see us do that," said Caldwell. "When we target different platforms, we want to give people a compelling reason to use our application… it’s going to be a big deal, it’s not going to be just another undifferentiated streaming radio application." He pointed to the MyMusic feature as one way their app differs from the rest, and he’s right — other interactive streaming apps (Pandora, Last.fm, Slacker, etc.) focus on customized radio, not on-demand access to one’s own tunes.

Other new features in the new imeem mobile include the ability to email songs to any of your friends from the app so they can hear them for free on imeem and better-customized interactive radio stations, which now take into account the song ratings you’ve made on the site.

As for this MyMusic feature, it should please the imeem faithful and attract new users, while having the beneficial side effect of increasing the site’s catalog (assuming the company’s SnoCap database confirms that the copyright holder allows the song to be streamed there). For playing your music back to yourself via the MyMusic feature, though, there’s no such restriction.